From this Episode

On The Listening Post this week:Chris Wylie blew the lid off of one of social media's dirtiest secrets. The whistle-blower has alerted the world to the way Facebook enabled politicians to exploit personal data. Plus, why WhatsApp rumours can be fatal in India.

The Cambridge Analytica story

2018 was going to be the year Facebook would do things differently. Under intense scrutiny from governments and their regulators over fake news, hate speech and political manipulation on his platform, Mark Zuckerberg vowed to fix things.

Then, last weekend, The New York Times along with the Guardian and Observer and Channel 4 in the UK broke a story that shattered Zuckerberg's PR campaign: Cambridge Analytica, a data analysis firm employed by US President Donald Trump's election campaign, harvested the personal information of more than 50 million American Facebook users. The goal was to create targeted political advertising to influence voter behaviour.

This story sheds light on Facebook's business model of mass surveillance in order to make a profit off of users' information.